Doubled Knowledge

I

 often think of translation as a kind of empathy that unfolds in the space between author, translator, and reader. Successfully bringing a piece of writing from one language into another requires more than just fluency; translation is an act of emotional intuition that asks the translator not only to convey the literal meaning of each word, but also to weigh that meaning against the space it takes up in the text and the emotional resonance it holds for both the author and the reader. In her new novel, Paper Houses, translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins, Dominique Fortier proposes that the inverse might also be true: perhaps empathy requires translation that makes lives other than our own legible to us. Attempting to bridge the distance between disparate cultures and eras, Fortier traces an imaginary biography of Emily Dickinson by yoking her own experiences with feminine performance in the domestic sphere to Dickinson’s housebound life. In doing so, Fortier revises Dickinson, transforming her from a stoic, reticent figure of literary history into a woman much like herself. The poet becomes an ancestral figure for women who—as she did—survived in the face of constricted options and callous injustice.

But if Fortier connects her emotional reality with Dickinson’s, that connection also raises questions about the very nature of empathy. We often think of empathy as a kind of understanding, a way of seeing someone as they really are; but what if the translation that empathy requires means writing our own emotions and preoccupations over the Other’s? What if empathy means connecting to the Other by transforming her into the person we need her to be?

Paper Houses opens with lovingly rendered scenes from Emily Dickinson’s childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts. Fortier offers her biography in a series of snippets that struggle to cohere—until the author herself steps in, and the novel becomes a record of Fortier’s attempt to re-create Dickinson’s life. Soon Fortier’s own experience is woven into the fabric of Dickinson’s, but her project hits a snag. “For months, I have been rereading Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters… Is that preferable, or would I write better by visiting the two houses that have been turned into museums?” she asks herself. “Simply put: is it better to have the knowledge and experience required to describe things as they truly are or the freedom to invent them?” Is...